government – Page 268 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Latest Australian OHS statistics

On 22 August 2008, the Deputy Prime Minister and Industrial Relations Minister, Julia Gillard, released the Comparative Performance Monitoring Report (CPM) on Australia’s OHS and workers’ compensation outcomes for 2006-07. The principal points, according to the report, are:

• There were 236 compensated fatalities recorded in Australia for 2006-07, of which 177 were from injury and musculoskeletal disorders and 59 were from other diseases.

• Body stressing continues to be the mechanism of injury/disease that accounts for the greatest proportion of claims (42 per cent).

• The manufacturing industry recorded the highest incidence/claim rates per 1000 employees (27.5), followed by transport and storage (25.9), agriculture, forestry and fishing (25.3), and construction (22.1), however all these rates are down from 2005-06.

• Over three quarters (77 per cent) of injured workers successfully returned to work within eight to ten months of sustaining their injury.

The CPM report is available for download at www.workplace.gov.au/cpm

Countering Customer Aggression

Other than drunken pub patrons, customer anger seems to be common in social security offices. In Australia, until recently, there were few screens or barriers between staff and customers, perhaps an indication of Australia’s egalitarian culture, or perhaps, naiveté of current reality.

Centrelink, Australia’s social security agency, responded to the workplace hazard by banning those customers from face-to-face contact. Several people complained about this restriction and the complaints were investigated by the Commonwealth Ombudsman, whose report was released today, 25 August 2008. The Ombudsman found

“that in most instances the decisions to withdraw face-to-face contact were not unreasonable, but highlighted the need for national procedural guidelines to be developed to assist staff when managing customers who exhibit abusive or threatening behaviour.”

This justifies the removal of face-to-face contact, or in OHS terms, the risk has been eliminated.

However, the safety of staff may have been guaranteed but the anger of the client might still remain. It is in this context that the Ombudsman has recommended further changes to processes for the benefit of staff and clients.

Centrelink should be

• reviewing letter templates to ensure customers are properly notified of their review rights and the review process

• implementing strategies to ensure relevant staff are aware of the review processes required by the guidelines, and providing further training where appropriate

• introducing an appropriate internal monitoring/review mechanism to ensure quality and consistency in the application of alternative service arrangements

• encouraging decision makers to explore the most appropriate alternative servicing arrangement for future contact before deciding to withdraw face-to-face contact

• amending the guidelines to ensure staff record an appropriate level of detail to justify their actions and decisions following an instance of aggressive behaviour.

The Ombudsman’s report is available for download HERE

Politicians’ workplaces

Western Australian Premier, Alan Carpenter, is to be applauded for stating that the Parliament is a workplace. This sounds like stating the bleeding obvious but Parliament has often turned a blind eye to this fact.

Certainly, the Premier is in election mode so there is an additional context in this period to everything he says. On 22 August 2008, he was talking about a working bar that exists in the State Parliament and how inappropriate it is. The media reported him saying:

“Parliament House is a work place, the members of parliament should not be able to drink freely during working hours,” Mr Carpenter said. “Having a bar serving alcohol during working hours is completely out of step with community expectations. It is completely unacceptable that members of parliament are able to sit in a bar in their workplace and drink when they should be working on behalf of the community.”

There may be good reasons for having a bar in a workplace, but it may be inappropriate for workers to use the facility during business hours. For years, many workplaces have introduced policies concerning drugs and alcohol to, in my opinion primarily, to cover themselves against legal action. Thankfully such policies can also have a workplace safety role in the reduction of impairment.

Impairment relates to one’s fitness for work and is easiest to understand in the transport industries where one person is responsible for the safety of many members of the public. But I have never understood why the logical extension of impairment to decision making in other workplaces has not be made.

In a workplace, such as a Parliament, or a goverment building, where decisions are made that will affect the safety and welfare of the public, decisions should be made with no impairment, Policies should not be decided over a couple of bottles of scotch which was reported to be done by an education minister in Victoria several years ago. Another politician was “under-the-weather” in Federal parliament some years ago, even though the current Federal Parliament has no bar onthe premises.

Considering that Parliaments are workplaces, the governments should review other hazards that are being addressed in other Australian workplaces. The top of the list would be reasonable working hours, fatigue and stress. In most Parliaments, the security issue is being dealt with but workplace bullying could be applicable.

Alan Carpenter’s comments were political statements in an election campaign so they have a dubious weight but let’s start thinking of Parliaments as workplaces and start seeing our politicians as exemplars in OHS. If safety culture starts with leaders and safety champions, then can we blame workers and business operators who follow our leaders’ examples?

New work accommodation for Torres Strait nurses

In February 2008, a nurse was raped in her remote house on Mabuiag Island. The accommodation was provided as part of her occupation and risk assessments have identified that the house was not secure, poorly maintained and, in my opinion, unsafe. Previous SafetyAtWorkBlog posts on this issue are available HERE.

On 19 August 2008, the Queensland Minister for Health, Stephen Robertson, officially opened primary health centres on both Warraber and Erub Islands.

The Warraber Island facility cost $A4.45 million and includes:

two, two-bedroom staff accommodation units
expanded clinical areas
a dental chair
a conference room.

The $6.84 million Erub Island facility includes:

a three-bedroom doctor’s residence
two, two-bedroom staff accommodation units
expanded clinical areas, including a dental chair, a morgue, and a conference room for video conferencing.

The media release emphasizes a feature rarely mentioned:

“Both centres have secure accommodation units to ensure the safety of local health staff.”

Theses costs are for upgraded clinics with very good facilities and housing is only part of the projects.

Beth Mohle, Assistant Secretary with the Queensland Nurses Union, told me today that the official opening of these facilities had been delayed for several months due to the difficult of providing a reliable electricity supply to the clinics. These facilities had been planned for a considerable time, well before the February 2008 attack. In fact the previous facilities on Erub Island had been so bad that the facility was condemned.

Beth said that the new clinics had been assessed by the union’s OHS officer in March 2008 and found to be very suitable. There were several minor security issues but the union was generally happy with the clinics.

A formal maintenance schedule for the facilities has been committed to be the government.

Beth said that the remaining outstanding issue for negotiation with Queensland Health is the operation of duress buttons for its members. However a trial of a satellite-based system through Skynet Mobile Communications is under way where the community police will be informed immediately of any problems.

The underlying challenge for all OHS issues in Torres Strait seems to be the remoteness. Many of the islands have no mobile phone communication coverage and nursing staff have only recently received automobiles. Previously wheelbarrows were used for transporting equipment on the islands.

To update readers about the circumstances of the nurse who was attacked on Mabuig Island, the case against the attackers is still before the Courts. The nurse is no longer working in that profession and she has a WorkCover claim relating specifically to the effects of the attack.

Beth Mohle spoke optimistically about the progress made on the campaign to improve housing and facilities in these remote communities but we must remember the unnecessarily unsafe conditions that workers were expected to operate in. The future may be hopeful but much of this hope is built on pain and trauma.

OHS harmonisation could create disharmony

OHS experts have said that the Victorian OHS legislative structure is leading the way in being a major influence on the National OHS Model Law Review. A leaked email, reported in the 15 August 2008 edition of the Australian Financial Review, has John Merritt, CEO of WorkSafe Victoria, calling for a summit before the end of 2008 at which tough enforcement policies are to be discussed with his counterparts from other Australian States.

His call seems to be in response to an equivocation on OHS harmonisation that would allow States to have different ways of applying national OHS laws. This flexibility has been flagged for some time and has the potential to allow just as much jurisdictional confusion and overlap in a new structure as there is currently.

The leaking of the email does not help the process of OHS legislative review but it does identify a potential weakness in the national OHS model law review process if the government is not decisive. The Rudd government has been in for less than 12 months and has applied a rapid pace of legislative review. Several reports and recommendations have already been released with the impact of wet lettuce. For instance, Bracks’ automotive industry review has cost a lot of money for minor tweaks to the status quo unless you are a conservative voter who chooses an imported vehicle.

Whatever the government’s response to the OHS law review, it needs to be one that will stand the test of time, as the UK’s Roben’s review has since the early 1970s. It also needs to be brave enough to see OHS law as independent from industrial relations law. Too often OHS is the tail to the IR dog. The OHS and IR Acts are separate legislation even though the application of the laws overlap at the shopfloor.

We have to remember that harmonisation is the sum of many different voices making up a song, not everyone singing the same tune at the same time. Perhaps the the wrong goal was aimed for at the start of the process.

Working Alone in the Sex Industry

One of the strongest qualities that a consultant has is to provide a new perspective on an existing process. For over 10 years, I provided OHS advice to the Victorian sex industry. It started in response to a call for first aid advice from a dominatrix in Melbourne. I provided advice on the best treatment for scorch marks on nipples and how to best clean a leather paddle which may have had a small amount of the client’s blood in the seams.

My work culminated in drafting a book on OHS in the adult sex industry for CCH Australia. The company was restructured and my book was dropped. However much of the information in the 40,000 words already written is still valid and I was happy to allow part of it to be reproduced by RhED in the latest issue of their magazine for sex workers.

The strength of any OHS publication and guideline from the government is its applicability to those occupations on the fringes of society. The sex industry inhabits that fringe but few governments have provided OHS advice for the sector, although I admit that Australia is a leading provider of sex industry safety information.

In Red magazine, I have interpreted the Western Australian OHS guidelines on working alone to the sex industry. The guidelines were surprising useful.

As with many health work sectors or fringe industries, workers and employers don’t often look beyond the advice that is available from their industry association or government department. As such information from OHS regulators doesn’t always get to the industries where it is best needed. More guidelines in the sex industry need to come from a coalition of government departments. For instance, in Victoria, safety in the sex industry overlaps the Department of Human Services, the Department of Justice and the WorkCover Authority.

Safety in the sex industry seems to rely on consultants like myself (and you could count them on one hand) or organisations like RhED, the Inner South Community Health Service, and the Scarlet Alliance, to pull together these disparate safety guidelines in to a suitable package.

(For those interested in the sex worker industry, $pread Magazine in the US sometimes has useful safety tips and case studies)

UPDATE – 6 October 2008

RhED has posted an interesting profile on sexworkers in Victorian brothels. The statistics provide a very useful background to some of the information above.

UPDATE – 9 January 2008

The Red magazine article on working alone is now available online.

Kevin Jones

Why are many of China’s coalmines closed?

Safety At Work magazine has been reporting on the seemingly endless deaths in the Chinese mining industry for many years. Many of the mine fatalities are of multiples that would generate huge investigations in the west. Many deaths are compounded by the attempts of mine managers to minimise the scale of the disasters by delaying reporting the incident, not reporting at all, or disposing of the bodies.

These incidents have occurred mostly in privately-run mines and over the last couple of years the government has had regular crackdowns on the industry.

China is a good example of a country that manages safety in reaction to disasters. Poor safety management is often ignored as long as production is guaranteed. This is evident in its manufacturing sector as much as it is in mining.

John Garnaut in The Age newspaper on August 4 2008 reports on the actions of the Chinese government in the mining sector in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics. Garnaut reports that migrant workers were sent home weeks ago without pay. At one mine he attended, work was stopped by management, ostensibly due to his presence as a journalist.

The closure of these mines has had a heavy impact on the coal supply and coal prices and Garnaut says that the action of the government has come about to

“prevent the Olympic Games from being marred by embarrassing reports of mine disasters.”

China’s decision shows how sensitive it is to criticism from other countries. The mess over internet access is a further example.

China does not only manage safety reactively, it manages through diversion, concealment and censorship.

What Garnaut’s reporting and China’s censorship shows is that safety of workers, and accountability of business owners can be improved through the attention of outsiders. For over seven years, in my experience, China has been experiencing almost monthly fatalities in its coal industry. I have been publishing whatever reports I can obtain (legitimately) from the wire service, however similar reports have not been appearing in the mainstream, or event the trade, press. The community is generally unaware of the cultural negligence that the Chinese system of production and regulation allows.

Perhaps it is a truth that few of us really care but one of the major threats to any management process is hypocrisy. The Chinese government may be comfortable with that but our own governments should not be hypocrites in our trade negotiations with partners like China.

UPDATE

The Associated Press has reported a gas explosion in a coal mine in at the Baijiagou mine in the northeast of Liaoning province on 18 August 2008. Twenty-four workers are trapped but fifty-six other miners escaped without injury. The story came through the Xinhua News Agency in China, so it will be worth seeing, during this Olympics fervour, what attention this disaster receives from the West

Category: government

Latest Australian OHS statistics

Like this:

Countering Customer Aggression

Like this:

Politicians’ workplaces

Like this:

New work accommodation for Torres Strait nurses

Like this:

OHS harmonisation could create disharmony

Like this:

Working Alone in the Sex Industry

Like this:

Why are many of China’s coalmines closed?

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: